On Being Very Poor

My own experience with poverty bears a hallmark of extreme ignorance and cruelty. My Mom attended the grades, one, three and five. She achieved a reading competence that afforded her pleasure in her favorite magazine, The Reader's Digest. Working her youth away as a migrant laborer, she had little opportunity to learn social skills. She ran off with a boyfriend at age sixteen, had three sons from the resultant marriage, then gave her husband the slip to go to California with her parents. As a result, I have no remembrance of that side of the family. The few stories about the man paint him as a thief and alcoholic, a cruel, selfish person.

It didn't take her long to meet and marry a man who was not one whit better than the first. My heart sank into my shoes when she announced, "This is your new father."

We brothers always feared and mistrusted him from the first. He was courtly to the extreme with Mom, but even early on, he displayed suspicious traits, such as pushing everyone away from the table until he had eaten his fill. He had a way with teasing and picking at one calculated to make one feel small.

After several years, the routine was, he took his paycheck and vanished three or four days, lasting until his money ran out. The days he spent with us became increasingly hostile. My younger full brother, he picked at to make him feel ridiculous and fearful. Me, he decided would be the stupid one. He sat me down by the hour, breaking down my esteem, working til my thought processes developed a way of short circuiting. He picked a puppet of Edgar Bergan's (Mortimer Snurd), tried to make me out to be the same mentality. "Snurd" was my name, as far as he was concerned. My older brother was less subservient, and the only sibling given responsibility for anything. He had the nerve to talk back, and I never saw him given corporal punishment.

My mom had nine more children by this man. She told the doctors at the charity hospital early on she wanted a surgery to prevent further pregnancies. They declined, until the twelfth child was born. "You are too late," she reportedly told them.

Our sole source of support was welfare, paid to my two full siblings and me. We ate beans. My step father brought in eggs and steak for himself. My school lunch consisted of two slices of bread, a thin slice of baloney, and two dry cookies. Twice during the year, we were provided two pairs of blue jeans, two shirts, a new pair of shoes. By the end, the knees were blown out and I used wire to hold the soles of my shoes from flapping.

I had developed symptoms of autism by the time I started to school. I don't know when autism was invented, as a malady, and I don't know that my conditions actually apply. I sat through entire semesters without uttering a syllable. When children befriended me, they had to do all the talking.

By the time I became fourteen years old, I was pretty well defeated. I could "know" within myself that I was "special" and even belive I would one day be famous. But, I cowered before the entire world.

My step father became increasingly unstable. One evening he came home polluted. He took his butcher knives (he was a short order cook in a bar and grill) and informed my brother they were to fight it out with them. He ended up in jail that night.

At this point, he decided to move out (These kids don't want me here, and I'll be God damned if I'll stay). He spent the next year trying to get back in, but Mom found enough spine to resist. We boarded a train and moved back to Texas.

My brother took a job with an uncle at a pay of $1 an hour. A year later, I quit school to work with my grandfather for $7 per day. I was a willing worker, but had to be told what to do. They decided by my silence I must be stupid and treated me accordingly. I wanted very much to seek another line of work. I held a mortal terror of approaching potential employers. It is a fear which lasted beyond my fortieth birthday. I stammered, could not look them in the eye- -I was refused a job in a burger joint and a drive in movie concession stand. So I stuck with my relatives, until I married, at age thirty.

I finally began working the same type of jobs, except now with strangers. Eventually, I got jobs as a boss and even employer. But, I could not do business, allowing customers to dictate all the terms.

After I became a maintenance man, I achieved success- -not in a job I actually wanted, but at this I was good, and eventually became close friends with increasing numbers of people.

I don't tell my story, here, crying, and demanding sympathy. In fact, I don't need it. I have a good life, and am quite content. My purpose in writing this is to lay out the structure of poverty as it effects one life. I know not all poor persons are the same as me. Many are worse off, intellectually and emotionally, and others grew out of poverty at a young age. All I want is for the ones who resent the poor for being needy, to understand, that the poverty stricken are not willingly so. I worked twice as hard as anybody else at the jobs I did, but the good money and positions of importance always went to ones less deserving.

Pure welfare is not the answer in dealing with the poor, as different folks have different needs. The dismantled welfare systems that were built during the 1950s and 60s mostly threw money. The officials responsible were guilty of arrogant abuse of power. One person may need a bit of counseling, as did I. Another merely vocational training. Whatever. But, it is too costly! ****! It is not too costly to span the globe with a powerful military, or to give handouts to corporations. Why is it too costly to attend the needs of citizens? The priority of this century ought to be people, not military-corporate adventurism.